000			02334nam a2200181Ia 4500
999			_c161380 _d161380
005			20220302181538.0
008			200208s9999 xx 000 0 und d
082			_a320 SPI
100			_aSpiro, Herbert J.
245		0	_aResponsibility in government
260			_aLondon
260			_bVan Nostrand Reinhold
260			_c1969
300			_a179p.
520			_aRESPONSIBILITY IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT AND, indeed, of life today. Men pursue scarce resources, increase their knowledge of society and nature, and broaden the range of alterna- tives open to their choice in order to become more responsible for their fate. Even the most ideological dictator does not seek power for its own sake, but as a means for expanding his own capacity to assume responsibility for the fate of his nation or mankind. If he succeeds, chances are that he has been helped by the despair of individual responsibility on the part of ordinary people. On the other hand, most of the revolutionary issues of our time-the control of nuclear weapons, the anticolonial movement, the rise to political consciousness of America's Negroes, space exploration, the rebellion of youth-are driven forward by the universal yearning for greater responsibility. That is the thesis of this book. “The Decline of Political Theory” * has been much bemoaned during the past two decades. There has been a great deal of meth- odological ferment in political science during this period, and we may have made some progress in understanding and explaining the phenomena of politics. But to gain that understanding is only one- third of the task of political science. This task consists also of de- fining the goals toward which the community should be moving, and of building the bridge from the realm of values to the realm of facts. In that sense, this book is intended as a contribution to political theory-not, except perhaps incidentally, to the history of political philosophy, nor to the "critique of political economy, but to what I am tempted to call “constructive political theory." I have applied this theory of responsibility to a number of prob- lems in political science and have always found its synchronized normative and analytical dimensions very useful.
650			_aPolitical science.
942			_cDB _2ddc